


Say say my playmate, let me lay waste to thee

by CyanideBreathmint



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Content warning: Suicide, Huxloween, Knotting, Kylux - Freeform, M/M, Werewolves, content warning: body horror, content warning: cannibalism, content warning: drug and alcohol use mentions, content warning: gore, content warning: memory loss and flashbacks, content warning: self-harming, content warning: this whole fic lbr, content warning: vomiting, mentions of past benpoe, not actually omegaverse, stop eating your johns kylo ren you don't know where they've been
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-07
Updated: 2018-11-17
Packaged: 2019-07-27 17:37:58
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 16,486
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16224020
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CyanideBreathmint/pseuds/CyanideBreathmint
Summary: Kylo Ren drifts from town to town, fleeing himself, but he can't free himself from the wolf no matter how he tries, nor can he fight the lust and hunger for human flesh (in more senses than one) whenever the moon rises bright and full.And then he meets a mysterious red-headed man in a shitty bar, a man who seems to know every one of his desires, and neither he nor the wolf can resist following the stranger's summons.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I've put the content warnings in tags, but here's them again so you can't say you didn't see them, mkay? Please heed them, I'm not idly fucking around here. 
> 
> Content warning: gore  
> Content warning: vomiting  
> Content warning: suicide  
> Content warning: body horror  
> Content warning: cannibalism  
> Content warning: drug and alcohol use mentions  
> Content warning: memory loss and flashbacks
> 
> Also: Happy October, Kyluxers. The title to this fic was stolen from TV On The Radio's Wolf Like Me, which is a pretty good werewolf song, all things considered.

The merciless sun probed cruel fingers through Kylo Ren’s eyelids as he lay sprawled across a motel room floor, and he flinched against the pain, turned his head against the hurt, and then felt a great unease lurch through his body. _No,_ he thought, his legs tangled up in something, _no, not on the_ — Bitter bile welled up in the back of his throat, and sour acid, and he was choking, trying to breathe shallowly as he clawed his way across worn carpet. Cold tile clicked under his overlong fingernails, its chill banishing the nausea briefly, but it was too late to halt this, and he managed to grab hold of the porcelain toilet, bent his face ungracefully over it to vomit noisily, in great gouts. 

It hurt to throw up, it hurt like his throat was raw, but he couldn’t fight it, and out it came, God knew what. He tasted blood and the stale ghosts of bourbon, the salt and bleach and the latex of a used condom — _I can’t have swallowed that,_ he thought in a panic, but the thought was blotted out by misery as he emptied his twisting belly yet again. The world swam around him, shivery and liquid, and it’s all he could do to push himself away from the commode he had just defiled, to fall in a heap on the floor before he brained himself, his hands closing absently around the stem of the toilet as though he were trying to choke it out.

Ren tried not to think of last night, but then he could never remember the nights, in any event. The competing tastes in his mouth sickened him, and he retched weakly, but there was simply nothing left to throw up. Time to try to wash the filth off his skin and face the day. He hauled himself into the bath, crawling slowly into it as though his legs could not support him, and then pulled the shower curtain in, lay curled up in a fetal position while warm water drummed upon him from above. He opened his mouth like a baby bird, let the water fill it, swirled and spat until he could taste little more than chlorine, chlorine and chalk and rust from hard water and aging pipes. 

The heat soothed the cramp in Ren’s belly at least, helped unknot the tension in his back and shoulders and legs, and he began to unfurl slowly, minutely as the water continued to rain upon him from above. Idly he thought of plugging the drain, of letting the water fill the bathtub until he drowned, but he knew it wouldn’t work. He’d tried drowning before. Instead he managed to climb to a seated position beneath the shower head, watched the water stain rust brown as he rinsed dirt and dried blood off his skin, out of his hair. The cheap perfume of free motel soap began to fill the small bathroom, cloying and chemical, but Ren received it like a sacrament upon his tongue, let the bitterness of the suds cleanse him through and through. 

Only after he was done drying himself, standing naked upon a rumpled towel as water dripped out his hair, did he dare to look at the contents of the commode. A vile stew floated within the ring of the toilet seat; what looked like chunks of red-brown fur — what had been a squirrel, perhaps — and yes, a used condom. Bits and pieces of food, and bobbing to the top like sausages were several human fingers. Ren sighed and closed his own hand upon the flush handle on the tank, almost turned it before he spotted something gleaming upon one of the fingers. He reached into the toilet without hesitating, picked the finger out with his bare hand. 

It was a ring finger, a man’s, from the size of it, with a plain gold band upon it. Ren took his malodorous prize to the sink and rinsed it briefly, prised the ring off the ragged end of the finger stump, and dried it with a piece of toilet paper. And then he threw the finger back into the toilet and flushed, holding the handle down until the tank ran dry, until everything had been banished down the sewer pipes. The gold ring remained pristine, perfect, clutched tight against the palm of his hand as he retreated back into the motel room to clean up. 

Once the thought of human fingers in his vomitus would have driven him to suicide, and there had also once been a point where robbing the dead was beyond the pale, but now Ren thought only of the dwindling sheaf of banknotes that he kept in a neck wallet tucked under his shirt, and how much further he could go on what little cash he had left. He left the ring on the nightstand and went through the room, retrieving his ruined jeans and t-shirt and tossing those into a Wal-Mart plastic bag. Once he would have tried to mend and launder those, but he had learned better. Some stains never really came out, and a replacement set of clothing was just one or two thrift stores away. He had learned enough to wear black so the blood wouldn’t show, and there was usually so much damage to his clothing that a needle and thread could do little no matter how he tried. Best to get rid of them discreetly. 

Ren hauled on a fresh pair of jeans, still smelling of detergent from the last laundromat he had been in, two towns ago, and pulled a notebook out of his duffel bag, flipped to a small, painstakingly-drawn calendar in the middle of it, and crossed another day off. _It’s been two nights,_ he thought idly as he gnawed on a pencil stub, _tonight is the third. Best to be far away from here before nightfall, then._ He didn’t want to leave any kind of traceable pattern behind for the authorities to find. There was a gold-buying shop conveniently near the local bus station, Ren remembered as he put the notebook back in his bag, but he also knew it would be stupid to fence his spoils before he left. He checked the money in his neck wallet, sighed when he found the crisp new fifties in it. 

So last night’s guy had paid him, too. Fuck. Poor bastard probably hadn’t deserved what he had gotten, then, even with the wedding ring on his finger. Ren tried the gold ring on his own hand, slipped it on to his pinky. It was the only finger it would fit. _I’m sorry,_ Ren thought silently to whoever had bought that ring in the first place. _He’s not coming back to you. Move on. Find someone who doesn’t have shitty taste in hustlers._

—

Nobody bothered Ren on the Greyhound bus out of town. He’d lost a lot of muscle mass over the past year, traded bulk for spareness, but he was still big enough that only the drunk and the drugged-out, or armed morons stupid with their own sense of power tried to fuck around with him, and Ren didn’t even fear guns and knives any more. It was hard to fear guns after that first horrifying month, when he’d put a pistol’s muzzle in his mouth and pulled the trigger, only to wake up to blood and brains in his hair, bits of bone scattered about his intact head like a halo of broken eggshells, with his belly uneasily full of what he had prayed was roadkill the morning after. 

He huddled within his own bubble of space, his fists closed and fingers curled over the cuffs of his gray hoodie, and stared at the landscape passing him by, brown autumn grass and colorful leaves, the world settling down to curl up nose-in-tail, without actually seeing any of it at all. Behind him a young woman sobbed quietly to herself, and he could smell the blood and bruise on her skin without looking at all, the iodine she’d dabbed on the cuts under the cheap perfume and deodorant she’d been wearing. 

An uneasy sense of hunger rose on waves of pity, and Ren had to remind himself that he’d eaten already, that he’d grabbed a couple slices of pizza at a nearby hole-in-wall restaurant before he’d gone to buy his bus ticket. The gold ring winked still on his right pinky, and he sighed as the rumble and jolt of the bus began to soothe him, began to allay his urge to pace and growl and stalk up and down the middle aisle. He was moving, he was leaving, he was going somewhere else, and this would make things safe for everyone, in the long run. 

Save for the next unlucky bastard he ran into, anyway. 

It wasn’t as though Ren hadn’t tried to stop himself. He had. There had been the pistol, and after that the cinder blocks and chains, razor blades, pills, a syringe overly full of tarry heroin. None of those had worked. After that he had tried more indirect means. He had chained himself to a tree in the middle of the woods, only to wake up miles away with fragments of someone’s plaid shirt between his teeth. He had found a foreclosed home in the middle of a dead, blighted neighborhood and barricaded himself in the basement, somewhere in Iowa, and come to consciousness the next morning with splinters in his gums, under his fingernails, and toddler-sized fragments strewn around a very small puddle of blood and guts. 

Ren didn’t like thinking of Iowa, even now. He had fled the scene, mindless, washed in a drinking trough, sobbing, retching all the while, and a cop had tried to stop him. He remembered the hard punch of the gunshots, one and two when he had run instead, the blood running curiously hot down his back and chest, and the bestial rage that had filled him in response to the pain. He didn’t even come back to himself until he had found himself in Indiana, missing a week and a half of time and memory and all his belongings, save for the wallet around his neck. 

There a kind woman had spotted his old Marine tattoo, taken him for a homeless veteran who had been robbed, given him some of her husband’s old clothing and a hot meal. Her husband the rancher had himself offered Ren a job, but he had refused and left, knowing that he could not stay. He had not wanted to repay their kindness with death, had not wanted to wake up covered in their blood and guts too.

No. What Ren did now was the best option he had out of a figurative hand of cards that had dwindled down to the joker. He would have folded, had tried with all those varied methods of suicide, but even death had refused him, so he did the only thing left to him at this point, which was to survive. He killed so he wouldn’t kill more, and that was fair, in the balance of things. It wasn’t as though people would stop dying early without him around. Car accidents happened. Plane crashes. Strokes and heart attacks and earthquakes, and it was just so much easier to think of what happened around him as some kind of random disaster, as a force of nature instead of something he did every full moon. 

—

Another small town, another bar. Ren had stopped paying that much attention to where he was going as long as it was some distance away from his last destination. Neon light and cigarette smoke, tobacco and nicotine and the ghosts of spilled beer swirled around in a thick fog about his head. It wasn’t quite full dark yet, but it might as well been inside, and Ren nursed a cheap beer as he tries to ignore the assault of sound and smell. There was a salty mustiness to this place, a breath of stale come and cheap perfume that told him he’d fit in just fine, just as long as he watched himself around the other men. It was always a fine tightrope he had to walk — he needed to find a shitty enough place to hustle in, but shitty bars came with assholes insecure in their masculinity, here to pick up chicks, and Ren needed to advertise his position without looking like he was coming on to the straight crowd. 

Not that he had to advertise much these days. There was a certain kind of queer man, the kind who often wore a wedding ring and pretended to be an upstanding citizen most days, who gravitated straight for a boy like Ren, someone broad and strong who he could push around for an hour or two. Those men often wore badges or clerical collars, and they wanted to feel manly even while balls deep in another guy. It was a mentality Ren catered to, even if he couldn’t quite understand why they didn’t just move to the city and live openly out there. Then Ren thought to why he couldn’t live in the city any more, why he lived this rootless existence, and sighed. He knew exactly why they couldn’t be themselves, knew what drove people out into bars like these where they searched for some way to assuage the hungers within. 

Ren had more than a few needs of his own to feed; they had driven him onward like wolves at his heels as he fled from town to town, and he had found no rest on his journey thus far. He watched the clock tick by, mindful of the encroaching night. He watched, detached, as his hands began to shake while he peeled the label off the empty beer bottle. _Good,_ he thought even as he fought the itch beneath his skin, _maybe someone will think I’m hustling because I’m desperate for junk money, try to take advantage of that._

Ren lingered at the bar for as long as he dared — moonrise was relatively late tonight, but he would still need enough lead time to get safely away from the town center if he didn’t get lucky. He glanced at the nicotine-stained clock on the wall, squinted to see the second hand tick past midnight when the door opened, letting a chill gust of wind into the place. The street lights cast a pale glow through the doorway, and stepping over the threshold was a taut, slender figure, patent leather shoes winking in cheap neon light. 

Ren caught a glimpse of the man, the top of his head past a woman’s frizzy bleached-blonde curls, and a trick of the light painted his hair the red of blood. The door swung shut behind him, but not until the air currents had brought the man’s scent to Ren’s nose. Spices, resins — pepper and frankincense, juniper and violets, and underneath it a sharp bite of clean sweat, of hot skin that made something stir under Ren’s skin in a frisson of hunger and unease alike. 

_What the hell,_ Ren thought, recognizing the cliche even as he invoked it, _is a man like that doing in a place like this?_ That slender man darted easily between the other patrons of the bar to step up to the bar, where he perched gracefully on the edge of of a barstool. 

“Jameson, please,” he said in a soft tenor, the words tumbling dulcet out of his raspberry lips, “a double.” There was a slight lilt to his speech, a crispness to his consonants that marked him as foreign, as having come from across the Atlantic. Red-gold eyelashes veiled his gaze as he accepted the shotglass from the bartender with a clipped nod, and Ren could not read the color of his eyes in the dim light of the bar. Ren closed his own eyes and took a long breath to steady himself, regretted it when it brought him another rich draft of the newcomer’s cologne, of the smell of his skin and hair and the faintest scent of wool and lichen and ammonia off the tweed suit he was wearing. Underneath that Ren fancied that he could smell the salt and copper of his blood laced with the sharp phenols of Irish pot-still whiskey.

Ren could not stop thinking of the hollow of the man’s throat where his pulse beat, that vulnerable skin over the immaculate collar of his dress shirt, of the nape of his neck where the hair was clipped short and neat. Ren wanted to sink his teeth into that Wedgwood skin, wanted to mark him with bruises, to fuck him and knot him and rip his throat out, tear him open and then roll around in the saignant richness of his blood, and he realized with a sudden shiver that he was already half-hard under his jeans. The friction of the metal zipper teeth was maddening through tough denim, and Ren could feel the hairs on his arms and the backs of his hands stand up. Ren wondered for a split second if he could lure this man to the toilets for some quick rough trade, wondered if that was why he was here in the first place. 

_Bad idea,_ his logical mind told him, but his cognition was rapidly being drowned out by his instincts, by a rising panic and dismay as he watched the second hand continue to tick on the brown-hazed clock hanging above the bar. _I need to leave this place,_ Ren thought, _before I lose control. He looks rich, he’s probably slumming, someone would miss him if he vanished._

It took all of Ren’s considerable self-control to pay for his beer and leave the bar without looking back at the beautiful redhead sitting two stools away from him, and he could feel something in him rending, tearing as he pushed at the door, let it shut behind him to leave him alone and bereft in the night. _Moonrise is in three hours,_ he told himself, _I need to be in the woods._ It was going to be a hard night, a painful night to bear alone, and he stumbled on deadened feet through the shittiest part of town, biting his lip at the weight and sensitivity of his twitching cock in his jeans. Fuck, but he needed to get laid so badly, and he was starving, shaking with the intensity of his hunger as he trudged away from the bar. 

\---

Ren hadn’t gone very far when a pair of headlights illuminated him from behind, accompanied with the soft purring of a motor, the sound of tires on asphalt. _Not a cop car,_ he told himself, _please don’t be the police._ It wasn’t the idea of getting caught that he dreaded as much as what would come after. _What’s going to happen to me when they find me out at last, and find out I can’t die? Am I going to be locked away in a lab and vivisected so they know how I change?_ It was the unknown that scared him, scared him more than death currently did at this point, and he knew deep down that he was a coward, a sheep wearing a wolf’s hide.

Whoever it was pulled alongside him, and it was not a cop car. The passenger-side window came down, and there was that scent again, that fragrance from the bar. It was stronger, more concentrated this time from all the time that man had spent in his car, how the closed windows would have preserved and concentrated that scent of cologne and sweat and skin from all the time he’d spent driving, like a humidor. Ren froze in his tracks, his belly clenching, and he tasted blood in his mouth as he bit down on his own lip again. “You’re following me,” he managed to say thickly, glad that he could still manage speech at this point. 

“You looked as though you didn’t want to leave,” the man said, his voice still soft, almost soothing. “You look as though you need something very badly.” Ren could smell it then, the whiskey the man had sipped, a smell like Christmas baking and that faint burning sting of alcohol. 

“And what do you think I need?” Ren asked, fixing his gaze on that pale face hanging in the darkness inside the car, lit only by the glow from the dashboard. Eyes green as garnets regarded him with remarkable cool, and he wondered dimly if this guy was on something, to be this calm and collected when faced with Ren in all his hunger. Most humans could sense the danger inherent in his nature when he was this close to the change, assumed he was crazy or drugged and violent. 

“I know exactly what you need, Kylo Ren,” the man said, and the invocation of Ren’s name held him stock-still for a moment, as though a spell had been laid upon him. “I know your hungers.” 

“Then you should get the fuck out of here,” Ren said desperately. He could feel the change itching within him for some reason, despite the fact that moonrise was two hours away. His other self yearned to burst forth, to claim this beautiful man for the night. 

“I’m not afraid of you, Kylo Ren,” the man said, and then the lock on the passenger-side door popped up, an unspoken invitation. “Get in the car.” 

It took Ren a fumbling moment to remember how to use his human fingers, to remember he had a thumb as he climbed clumsily into the passenger seat, let himself slouch. He sat in air intensely scented of this alluring stranger as his cock shivered to full hardness. “Who are you?” Ren managed to ask at last, as the window slid up beside him, “How do you know my name?”

“Tonight’s not the time for questions,” the stranger said to Ren. Long, slim fingers closed on the gearshift of the car, and he shifted into first gear as he put his foot down on the accelerator, and it was all Ren could do to close his eyes and suck on his own wrist, distracting himself with the taste of his own skin and sweat so he wouldn’t just maul this man outright. 

\--- 

Ren barely remembered the drive, couldn’t concentrate on where he was going or where this man was taking him. The only thing he could be certain of was that the drive had taken at least an hour, from the movements of the stars and moon in the sky, and that they had stopped outside a well-kept house on private land, away from town limits. The stranger helped him out of the car with a surprising, wiry strength, and he did not resist when Ren held him up against the side of the car and pressed his mouth to the side of his neck, nipping and licking. 

He only spread his slender fingers through Ren’s unruly dark hair, caressing him gently with the points of his fingernails as he answered Ren’s ravenous kisses with his own. “I know what you need,” he purred softly, between gasps, “I know.” 

“How do you —” Ren started to ask, but he was silenced by that hot red mouth again, that slippery tongue darting between his sharp teeth, flickering against his own. Ren’s arousal was electric, intense, leaving him trembling in his own skin as though he had been charmed by a piping flute. _It’s snakes that do this,_ Ren thought raggedly, incoherently, and then it ceased to matter as the redhead’s teeth grazed the skin of Ren’s neck. _Fuck,_ Ren thought, feeling his knees start to wobble, _fuck._

“Let’s get you inside,” the stranger said before Ren could kneel to unzip his fly, kiss his way up the length of his cock, and that was what they did. They left their clothing strewn behind them like breadcrumbs in a forest once the door was locked, their bodies held taut against each other. A sneaker, a still-knotted necktie, a patent leather wingtip, those things marked their path as they stumbled inexorably to the bedroom, marked the places they paused to grind against each other and neck on the way there. The redhead’s skin was milky-pale, his body standing out in the darkness like the fat gleam of a wax taper, and the dim light bouncing off his red hair resembled the flame atop the candle itself. His skin was sweet, sleek, unmarked by scars, and Ren wanted nothing more than to rake his nails through that flesh, to leave him covered in a filigree of red. 

“You’re perfect,” Ren managed to stutter as they tumbled into bed together, “but you shouldn’t be doing this. I shouldn’t.” It was getting harder and harder to think rationally, but Ren wanted to make the effort for this beautiful man. He could feel the beast within him clawing at his chest and belly as though attempting to tear its way out, and the pain only intensified every time he resisted it. This, perversely did not banish his erection, but only aroused him all the more. 

“Why not?” the redhead asked him, straddling his waist easily. Ren arched up in a futile attempt to nestle his cock against the curve of the man’s ass, whined softly, but he made himself lie still as tears spilled hot out the corners of his eyes to run down his temples and soak his hair. 

“I don’t want to hurt you,” Ren murmured desperately against the top of his new lover’s head, closing his eyes against the sensation of a hot mouth against his own neck, “you need to lock me in, just for tonight.” The redhead was rubbing his fine cock insistently against the skin of Ren’s belly, and the contact managed to banish some of the desperation, but even so Ren felt as though his muscles were swelling painfully, about to burst. He was too full of blood, too full of the urge to bite and fuck and kill. 

“It’s okay,” the man whispered, his breath hot and sweet against Ren’s throat, “it’s okay. You can’t hurt me.” Ren felt him climb off his waist, heard the soft click of a bottle cap being flicked open. He gasped as cold lube dripped down his cock, hot and hard and hurting with the intensity of his arousal, shivered at the shocking chill of it, and arched bodily into the stranger’s hand as he closed those bony fingers around his cock. 

“Take me,” the stranger whispered, once Ren had settled down again, _“knot me.”_

“Fuck,” Ren sobbed, as he opened his eyes to the sight of the redhead lying languidly on his side on the other side of the bed. He knew that he couldn’t fuck this man, that he would not stop at just fucking him, not tonight, that tomorrow he would wake up covered in blood again, tangled in guts, his jaw aching from having bitten again and again into dead flesh. 

“Do it,” the stranger said, and then he climbed on all fours and thrust his ass backwards, presenting his lube-slick asshole, the soft red hairs sparse over his scrotum, and Ren could no longer fight his urges. He took only a moment to line himself up, and then plunged mindlessly into the soft velvety heat of the redhead’s asshole, growled deep within his belly in satisfaction at the way his cock fit so perfectly within him. The stranger answered Ren’s growl with one of his own, and he began thrusting fast, hard, shoving the whole length of his cock into the tight maze of the redhead’s gut. It was good, so good, being able to lose himself in eager flesh like this, being able to let himself go like he never had before, not since that first confused night, naked and covered in blood in the woods.

Ren loomed over his lover, his hips slapping loudly on the redhead’s firm ass, both his hands palm-down against the mattress to either side of the redhead’s shoulders as he braced himself for each stroke, and a slender finger reached up to caress his knuckles gently. The touch breathed acceptance and capitulation to Ren, an utter and willing consent, and he felt tears blurring in his eyes again as the heat, ache and pressure in his cock and balls began to rise up his spine like fire. 

He himself had been in that position so many times before while some stranger held him down and fucked him, but it had never been a matter of trust, merely an exercise in endurance, in patience, in waiting while the wolf within paced its prison of flesh and bone. He had spent so many nights face down against the hood of a car, or on a motel room bed, his chest pressed to the cheap sheets, on his knees in a dark lot whiling the minutes away until the lust and hunger overtook him, overcame his shame and aversion in a burst of fierce joy and anger.

Ren didn’t need to be able to see the sky to know at this point that the moon was rising, that the change would come soon, but that was something the stranger had known, too, had asked for, and Ren could only acquiesce to that request. 

_Knot me,_ the redhead had begged, and Ren felt his self blurring, felt his boundaries changing and shifting as the moon rose fully at last. His bones itched fiercely as they reconfigured themselves according to his changing blood, and then there was the agonizing wrench of flesh and muscle, of viscera twisting uncomfortably as he began to change. 

“Yes,” the redhead shouted as though in triumph, “yes. Give it all to me.” It was less a cry of passion as much as one of deep compassion, of a knowing acceptance of Ren’s burden and an attempt to share it, and Ren howled in arousal and triumph as the change completed itself. The hands braced to either side of the stranger’s shoulders were no longer hands but paws, black-furred and large, and still the redhead continued to caress him with gentle fingers, that light touch passing softly through the fur between his toes. 

The world was now a brighter, more colorful place, its smells palpable, tangible to Ren’s newly sensitive nose. Every trace of scent jumped out to his reconfigured nerves, but foremost in his sensorium was the smell of the redhead’s flesh and skin, of his blood and sweat and the sweet precome leaking out of his cock, and Ren felt his knot filling, swelling in unspoken response to his partner’s arousal. The redhead yelped then, his voice breaking in an inarticulate utterance of shock and pleasure as Ren thrust bestial, animalistic into him, letting his swollen knot stretch his lover’s ass and stroke his prostate relentlessly.

It was no longer lust that burned solely in Ren’s belly at this point, but hunger too, and he could no longer fight the compulsion to bite, so he did, sinking his sharp white fangs shallowly into the stranger’s neck as he fucked the man raw and hard, according to instinct. That perfect ass was tight, even tighter now that Ren had changed, his cock even harder from the baculus holding it stiff. Blood ran from the puncture wounds on the redhead’s neck, and Ren savored its flavor, its salt and iron tang as it dripped to spot the sheets with red. 

“That’s right,” Ren’s lover said, a tremor in his soft voice betraying a hint of pain, “that’s right, just let it all out. Let me take care of you.” He was still, shaking with his spine held taut and Ren recognized in him the signs of impending orgasm. As himself he would likely have reached down to stroke his lover’s cock, savor the sensation of come spilling hot into his hand, but the wolf in him cared not for his partner’s satisfaction, only for the promise of pleasure and a full belly afterwards. He continued fucking the man not so much to bring him off as much as to chase his own climax, but the effect Ren’s knot had on the redhead was obvious as he keened high and desperate, and then shuddered, his ass tensing even tighter around Ren’s cock as he spilled himself in messy gouts onto the sheets. 

The smell of come, hot and bleachy and salty, rose up in Ren’s canine nose like incense, mingled with the heady fragrance of blood, and the scents intermingled struck him like a hammer blow to the brain stem. Ren whimpered and whined in response to that encouragement, slamming himself up and up and up that molten heat, soft sodden velvet caressing his cock so perfectly. He bit down hard when he came, his haunches quivering, furred skin against bare as he shot the redhead’s tight ass full of spunk, tasted the man’s lifeblood filling his jaws. Ren lapped greedily at the spilling blood, feeling it assuage his hungers as his knot held him in that exquisite, unresisting ass. He paused licking to catch his breath, panting hard as his partner sagged face down beneath him, his pale face buried in the pillows, and a vague human sadness filled the instinct of his changed soul. 

_He was perfect,_ a dim voice in the back of his mind said, _perfect, and now I’ve killed him, like the rest._ Ren nuzzled softly at the back of the redhead’s head in regret, and then snorted in vague surprise, his ears pricking up as the man pushed himself back up from the pillows, squirmed a bit as his back shifted against Ren’s belly. 

“I told you that you can’t hurt me,” he said, his voice slightly hoarse as the wounds in his neck began to scab and close, a process that Ren recognized from his own attempts at suicide. “Not really.”

 _You are — like me?_ Ren thought as he lapped gently at the healing wounds, wolf-like, pressed his muzzle to the redhead’s waiting lips, man-like, as they both waited for his knot to go down. 

“How does it feel to no longer be alone?” the redhead asked him, and Ren could only whimper and yelp his joy and relief as the man reached up with a free hand to lightly stroke his muzzle, to run gentle fingers slowly through his fur.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ren finds his way back to his fragmented memories with Hux's guidance, but who is it he finds smiling back at him from his lost past?

The morning sun began its relentless assault upon Kylo Ren’s eyelids again, and he shied from it, flinched to turn away and bury his face in soft, thick fur. _Wait._ He sucked in a hard breath, twitched himself awake and winced at the taste of old blood in his mouth. The night before was a blank, but now he found himself staring very closely at a wolf’s ruff and hackles as he lay curled loosely around it, as though he had been spooning it last night. 

Its fur was warm and its breathing was slow, even, and for a moment he wondered if he’d somehow managed to run off with a she-wolf instead of killing someone, but then why on Earth would he be in someone’s bedroom if he had in fact eloped to join some pack out in the woods? The wolf stretched, its legs sticking gracelessly out for a few stiff seconds as it yawned, and then rolled over to face him, green eyes winking in its ruddy, narrow face. Lying like that it was incongruous, unnatural against the polished furnishings of the room, its fur plusher than the soft carpet spread across the floor, and its red-tinged fur looked more saturated, more real than the silk drapes hanging from brass curtain rods above the sashed windows. 

Green eyes. Ren had seen eyes like that some time before, before moonrise last night, but he did not have the time to cudgel his memory. There was a sort of shimmer and blur, a reconfiguring of space, and then lying beside him was a slender red-headed man, his hair tousled and unruly like Ren’s. A residue of styling product had left it stuck in the peaks and loops it had been pushed into before he had decided to curl up in bed beside Ren in wolf form. 

_You,_ Ren thought, recognizing him instantly from the bar. “You’re —” Ren tried to say, and then a great wave of nausea rippled through him and set his belly to a fierce cramp. 

“Shh,” the redhead said. “You’re not completely recovered from the change yet.” He reached over to the nightstand as Ren curled up into a fetal ball of misery, poured something from a bottle into an empty glass. “Here,” he said, holding the cup to Ren’s lips. 

The cup contained liquor, something spicy and sweet, smelling strongly of honey and spices, and its burn banished the nausea somewhat, filled Ren’s sinuses and throat with a raw heat. “What is this?” he coughed after he handed the empty cup back, “some magical werewolf potion?”

“What?” the redhead asked, his eyes alight with amusement. “No, it’s _krupnik_ , a Polish liqueur made from honey and vodka. I find it settles the stomach fairly well.” 

“Oh.” Ren wasn’t sure if he were relieved or disappointed at how mundane the remedy was, or that he hadn’t discovered it until now. His memories of last night evaded him still, swimming away from his grasp as he tried to put them in order. There had been the bar, he remembered, and then this man had stepped in and ordered a drink… 

“Wait,” Ren said, shifting in bed as things began to make sense again, “you knew my name. How do you know me? Are there any other werewolves out there, besides you? Why haven’t I run into anyone else until you?” The questions began to tumble over one another as Ren began to panic, an unreasonable fear flooding his chest as he forced himself to sit up in bed. He bit down on his lip, savored the tiny burst of pain as his body protested the movement. _I’m awake. I’m awake. This is real, not a dream._

“Shh, it’s okay,” the redhead told him, placing a careful hand upon his wrist. “I know you have a lot of questions to ask, and I promise you, I’ll answer them in time, but first, tell me how you feel.” 

Ren searched within himself, past the confusion and fear to find a jagged kind of hope and a bitter relief. “How I feel?” he asked rhetorically, shivered, and then tasted the salt of tears in his mouth. “I don’t know.” He was sobbing now, the world strange and incredibly unreal to him, and he closed his eyes and bawled into the pillow beneath his head as he lay back down, began to let out all the pain he had carried within him since those first lonely nights alone. 

\---

“We’d been watching you for a few months,” the redhead, whose name was Hux, told Ren as he sat, wobbly in a large claw-footed bathtub. “The pack, I mean,” Hux continued, sitting fully dressed in shirtsleeves and trousers, cross-legged on top of the fluffy bathroom mat as Ren lay in the hot water with his knees higher than his head, letting the hot water soothe the aches in his joints and muscles. 

“Since when?” Ren was drained, exhausted beyond his limits. It wasn’t just that he had just changed last night, or had some incredibly strenuous sex he didn’t quite remember having during the change itself. It was also the fact that he had spent most of the morning crying until his sides hurt, crying until he had run out of the ability to do so. Hux had only kept him safely tucked in bed, brought him a glass of water when he needed it, and let him vent some of the pain and fear he had been unable to express for so long. This was probably why he did not flinch or weep again when Hux spoke again. 

“Iowa,” Hux said, his voice soft, lower even than usual. “I can see you don’t like talking about what happened there,” he continued, “but that’s when you popped onto our figurative radar. We keep a lookout for — for maulings. For deaths blamed on dogs or wolves, just in case it’s someone like you.” 

“Someone like me,” Ren mused, oddly numb to the knives of his own memory. “Has this happened before, then?” There was something very comforting, very primal about being surrounded by hot water, and a part of Ren’s mind supposed this was why Hux was talking to him here, in the bath. It was a potent reminder of the womb, of the bloodwarm sea of amniotic fluid Ren had lived in before being thrust forth into this unforgiving world. 

“Yes,” Hux said, bringing his eyes back up to meet Ren’s, “but not for a very long time. We are a very disciplined people.” His gaze was steady, even, but bright with suppressed emotion. 

“I don’t understand,” Ren said, unable to identify or articulate the unease he saw in Hux’s fair face. 

“When you woke up this morning, next to me,” Hux said, his voice hardening ever so slightly, “you saw me change.” 

“You did, yeah,” Ren mused, thinking of how soft and thick Hux’s pelt had been, how good it had been to hold him close like that. “How do you control it?” 

Hux looked down briefly, and for a moment the emotion in his face was clear and bright. Rage. Anger. Guilt. “I was born to this, Ren,” he said softly at last. “I’m of the blood. That’s how most of us are. We mate with each other, or with humans, and once in a while one of our children inherits the change. But sometimes there are incidents. Sometimes one of us loses control and mauls someone. Usually they die. If they survive, though, then they, too, have the potential to turn, as you did.”

Ren shivered in the warm bathwater, shifted against the soothing slosh of the water. “And what happens after that?” 

“We usually take care of our own mistakes,” said Hux, averting Ren’s curious gaze again as he pulled a dagger from a wrist sheath hidden up the left sleeve of his shirt, where his shirt cuff hung undone.

“You kill them, you mean,” Ren said, oddly at ease with the implications. The blade was oddly short and broad, its surface inlaid with twisting lines of silver. This was a throat-slitter, not a stabbing blade, and Ren reached a wet fingertip out to trace one of the ornamental lines, paused when Hux pulled it delicately away from him.

“Sometimes,” Hux said before he sheathed the dagger again, his movements careful. “If they can’t learn to control themselves. Or if they don’t want to be a werewolf, and ask to end it.” 

Ren thought then about dying, his veins opened in this hot bath while Hux held him, whispered soft things to him. The thought was comforting, reassuring, and Ren found himself filled with a sweet longing for rest. “Could you end it for me, then?” he asked Hux. “I don’t want to live like this any more. I’m tired of killing.” 

Hux rose up on his knees then, rested a forearm on the rim of the bathtub as he leaned in to give Ren a gentle kiss on the forehead. “I can kill you, yes, with your consent,” he said as a single tear ran down his cheek to run off his chin, “ but I can also try to teach you to control yourself. Would you be willing to try it, for me?” 

Ren felt tears start in his own sore eyes again, just at the thought that Hux wanted to give him, of all people, a chance at life. “You’ll make sure I don’t hurt anyone else, right?” he said hoarsely, unable to control his own voice.

“I will,” Hux said, and he sealed his promise with another kiss, this one full on Ren’s lips. Ren gave ground before Hux’s hungry tongue, shivered in the warm bathwater as his body remembered what his mind could not, his cock twitching to hardness unbidden. 

“I’ll try anything for you,” Ren managed to gasp as they pulled apart for air, his mouth full of the sweetish taste of Hux’s spit, and then he thrashed, splashing water everywhere, when Hux reached down through the bathwater to give his cock a sharp, hard tug. 

\--- 

It was novel, almost, when Hux held Ren gently down in bed, never mind the water he was dripping onto the come-stained sheets; Ren had forgotten almost what gentleness felt like when juxtaposed with sex. It had been, for so long, anonymous men in motel rooms and alleyways, hard hands bending him roughly over a cold bathroom counter or the dusty hood of a car. 

But Hux was willing to take his time now that they were no longer ravenous, maddened by the light of the full moon, and Ren could only gasp and yelp and shiver when Hux rolled him over onto the soft down pillows and bent that raspberry mouth to the sensitive cleft of his ass. Ren couldn’t remember if he’d done this before in his old life, realized he didn’t particularly care. He was fully willing to let himself be a virgin again in this respect, to be surprised and delighted by the way Hux’s tongue lapped and probed at the sensitive ring of his asshole, and then past to stretch him gently from within. 

_Fuck_ and _Christ_ and _God,_ Ren moaned, blaspheming with joy as Hux’s breath teased the crack of his ass and his scrotum, his cock hard and aching and leaking little drops of pre-ejaculate onto the sheets beneath him. He muffled his cries by biting down on the pillow, let his fingers clench tight as Hux used his clever tongue to work him lax and loose, and then shouted with surprise when Hux followed that up with his long, lube-slick fingers. 

Ren had somehow missed the telltale _click_ of the cap being flipped open, when Hux had gotten the lube bottle, and Hux fingered him slowly, easily, fingertips lingering deep within in lazy circles that seemed to soothe an itch deep within Ren’s soul. Ren thrust his ass up against the relief of Hux’s ministrations, his pulse pounding in his ears to drown his world out in its primal drumbeat 

“Do you want to know what being knotted is like?” Hux asked Ren as he pulled his fingers briefly free, and Ren nodded wildly, mutely into the pillow, his movements turning into a shocked thrash when Hux slid three fingers into him this time, spread them with a wicked grin.

“Did you like it,” Ren asked him, turning his head from the pillow when he managed to find the capacity for speech again, “when I did it to you last night? I don’t remember much of it.”

“I loved it,” Hux assured him, “and you can tell me to stop any time you want. I can control myself.” 

“Okay,” Ren said, and then he gasped in surprise as Hux took hold of his hip and rolled him over, grabbed one of the spare pillows. 

“On your back,” Hux told him, “I want to see the look on your face while I knot you.” Ren acquiesced, letting Hux prop his hips up, and he waited patiently as Hux stripped naked in front of him. That done, Hux knelt naked between Ren’s knees and leaned forward to kiss him, rubbing his own hot hard cock against the greased cleft of Ren’s ass, up against the sensitive underside of Ren’s cock, and then those teasing lips against his neck were replaced with a long, sloppy tongue. The sweat-slick skin between Ren’s thighs was now covered in fur, soft and thick, and he could feel Hux’s heart thumping within the breadth of his ribcage as his fuzzy chest pressed up against Ren’s. Ren had not quite seen the change as much as sensed it, a seamless blur from man to wolf as though two tapes had been inexpertly spliced together. 

Hux was a beautiful wolf, his ruddy fur tipped with gold, and he left gentle nips on Ren’s neck, on the lobe of his ear as he lined his cock up with Ren’s ass. They fumbled briefly, and then Ren was reaching down to Hux’s belly, his fingers exploring the thick plushness of his pelage, the stiffness of bone holding Hux’s cock ready and erect in that form, and he guided Hux into his ass, shuddered as Hux plunged long and hard and eager into him with an low shivering growl. 

Ren sucked a long breath through his nose, exhaled against the stretch and burn of Hux’s cock gliding into him, and let his fingers close into the thick fur over Hux’s hackles and ruff. Hux whimpered soft and high in his ear, licking lightly at him until his caught his breath. _Is it okay to continue?_ he seemed to say with the gesture, and Ren closed his eyes, took stock of the sensations filling his body. 

“Yeah,” Ren breathed after a second or two. He dug his heels into the mattress under him, shifted his own hips so he met Hux’s belly more easily. “Yeah,” Ren said again, “keep going.” 

Hux licked at Ren’s mouth, a lingering kiss, and Ren pressed his lips to the soft skin of his muzzle, to the cold point of his nose as he started to thrust away in fast, powerful strokes. Ren hadn’t been fucked this hard ever, had never put himself at the disposal of a lover who could employ all the muscles in his hindquarters thus, and it was like being impaled sweetly, shot through with a hot and solid shaft of light that threatened to set him ablaze from within. 

“Oh fuck, _fuck,”_ Ren whimpered as Hux panted hard, their heartbeats synchronizing. Hux was merciless, unrelenting, and Ren was sure he could come with his cock untouched, was sure he would, when he felt Hux’s knot swelling within him. The sensation tore a shout out of Ren’s throat as the bulb of tissue grew larger, harder in his ass, and Hux held himself very still, quivering as he lapped at Ren’s chin solicitously. 

“I’m okay,” Ren managed to moan in response, “I’m okay, just give me a minute.” Hux was trembling, shuddering against him in his stillness, and Ren let go of his ruff to tangle his fingers in the soft fur between his ears, pull his narrow muzzle closer for another messy kiss. Ren took one breath, and then another, counting his heartbeats as he tried to hold on in this sweet hurt, in this delightful pain as Hux’s knot stretched him to his limits. _Fuck,_ Ren thought as the world swam around him, felt the gentle nip of Hux’s teeth against his neck ground him in reality. 

“You’ve got me crammed so full,” Ren whispered into Hux’s ear, “I don’t even know if there’s room for your hot load in me,” he gasped, and then Hux was panting hard, ears pricked forward in canine laughter as he gathered his powerful haunches under him and rammed his swollen knot forward, further into Ren’s abused ass.

 _“Christ!”_ Ren screamed, unable to bear the intense pleasure that burst throbbing within him as Hux’s knot pushed against his prostate. He reached up for the bed’s wrought-iron headboard, closed his fingers onto the cold metal until they bruised as Hux kept pumping, kept that fat knot pistoning in him with sweet, exquisite cruelty, and Ren felt himself come from within, his cock still hard and leaking over his belly. It was like being mauled, like being torn to pieces in ecstatic _sparagmos_ as Hux slammed home into him, howling in triumph and relief, and then Ren reached down and brought himself off again with an easy turn of the wrist, his seed splattering hot and sticky on his chest, his neck and chin, salty against his lower lip and in his mouth. 

Ren clung on to the bleachy taste of his own spunk, to the heat and warmth of Hux’s fur soft against his chest as his orgasm swept him into darkness, as a great heated peace settled upon his entire body. It was as though some divine hand had picked him up like a rag doll and wrung all the fear and hurt out of him, left him lying slack and empty of all but hissing static and the endorphin whisper of the afterglow. 

Somewhere in that quiet Ren registered that Hux was no longer a wolf, was a man again, all slenderness and sweat-slicked skin, his breath tickling soft and sweet across Ren’s collarbones as they lay tangled together, catching their breath. 

“You’re so good,” Hux whispered into his ear, “so perfect,” and Ren could only laugh weakly, breathlessly, surprised at being praised so lavishly. 

\---

They fucked again after a late breakfast of steak and eggs, this time long and languorous, letting the seconds go slowly by as they learned each other’s responses, as they began to map out the boundaries of their shared eroticism, of what they each liked. Ren found that Hux could not resist having the backs of his thighs gently teased, that a light caress just beneath the curve of his ass could leave him half-hard and trembling, and he exploited that fact mercilessly in their foreplay.

“We have needs,” Hux said almost didactically, riding Ren’s cock with exaggerated grace, edging him with each slippery inch of his rise, teasing him equally as he slid slowly back down, his muscles taut like a dancer’s. 

“It’s called being human,” Ren said, content to lie back and have Hux take his pleasure from him. It was always like this for Ren during full moons. Changes took so much out of him that he would have preferred to stay in bed all day if his circumstances had permitted, which they did not, most of the time. This soft, lazy fuck with Hux could not be more perfect if he had somehow reached into Ren’s head and plucked it whole from his deepest desires and dreams.

“Yes,” Hux said, gasping a little as Ren reached up to tease one of his soft pink nipples, “but it’s a little different when you’re a werewolf. You feel more intensely, see more sharply. The world is so much more with the wolf under your skin. It’s easier if you were born with it. Then you’ve spent your whole life living with it.” 

“Mm,” Ren grunted, shivered as Hux slid back down on his cock again. “Is this why we’ve been fucking like rabbits since you tracked me down last night?”

“Shrews, actually,” Hux said, as though they were in the middle of a biology lecture, “they’re actually capable of fucking themselves to death. But yes, it’s a lot easier to deal with a forced change if your needs are satisfied. It’s fighting the urge that makes it harder to control, do you understand?”

“It’s like… I dunno. Water pressure?” Ren asked him, the conundrum beginning to untangle in his mind at last. 

“That’s not a bad way to see it, no,” Hux said with a smile, and they had spoken no further for the rest of the afternoon. Ren found Hux as lovely a man as he had been a wolf, savored the sleekness of his smooth pale skin. His blood shone translucent through it when the sun slanted across the bed, making him look even more alive than he had before, and Ren could have gazed into those green eyes all day. 

Ren made himself memorize the texture of the soft curling hairs running up the insides of Hux’s thighs, of the firm curve of his muscular ass, the good hard bones of his wrists and ankles as they fucked, and they kissed again and again, Ren’s greedy mouth sucking quickly-fading bruises into the length of Hux’s neck and the jut of his collarbones, the soft curve of his hard jawline. 

Hux, for his part, learned exactly how much Ren liked having his hair pulled during sex — a lot — and had dismounted part-way through their fuck to sit astride his face, applying his clever, wicked mouth to Ren’s cock, sucking him down as Ren had explored the soft pucker and gape of Hux’s asshole with his inexperienced tongue. 

Their mutual predicament had become exquisitely untenable, the both of them caught between each other’s pleasure until Hux had simply held his breath and taken the head of Ren’s thick cock down his throat, swallowing around him as he had come in a burst of mindless joy. He had then waited patiently for Ren to catch his breath, and Ren had returned the favor hungrily, eagerly, learning the texture of Hux’s clean foreskin against his tongue. 

Hux had keened prettily, incoherently as Ren swirled his tongue in circles around the sensitive ridge around the head of his cock, and bucked desperately upwards into Ren’s willing mouth, his fingers closing tightly on a fistful of Ren’s hair. It hadn’t taken very long for Ren to get him off, not after Ren had reached up to caress Hux’s thighs with light teasing fingers, letting his touch linger hotly under the curve of his ass, and Hux had come with a shout of surprise, his spunk filling Ren’s mouth and dribbling down his chin in a briny, bitter gout. 

\---

It was only later, after the sun had set, that Hux spoke again. They were lying side by side in bed, the backs of their hands touching as they watched the shadows lengthen against the ceiling. 

“What’s happened to you — it’s a crime we view as seriously as murder or rape,” Hux murmured. Ren turned onto his side to look at him, saw his expression sobering, hardening for a moment. “It’s taking someone who has never learned to live like this, someone innocent, and forcing the wolf upon them. It’s a violation in so many ways.” He bent his head to kiss Ren on the forehead once, twice, and Ren squirmed closer to him upon those stained sheets, trying not to think of how Hux’s words made perfect sense.

“Do werewolves get punished for turning someone?” Ren asked, and Hux took him into his arms, held him close to ease his obvious discomfort.

“Always,” Hux said, “and always with death.” Ren listened pensively, his eyes half-closed as he registered the knife sheath Hux wore on the inside of his left arm even now. “Whoever turned you stole your old life from you, and it’s something I can’t give back. I can only try to help you through this.” 

Ren let his eyes slip shut then as he registered Hux’s words through the vibrations in his chest, felt an idle hint of curiosity stir between his ears. “If… if it had been someone else other than me, right?” Ren asked Hux, “It doesn’t matter if it’s a man or a woman, I guess. And you still had to chase them down like you did me… would you have fucked them the same as you did me?” 

“It would depend on what they needed from me first and foremost, Ren,” Hux said soothingly, easily. “Everyone has different needs, and it’s not about me, as fun as it is at times.” 

“I’m glad you had fun, I guess.” Ren said, oddly pleased at the thought of Hux’s enjoyment. A smile spread itself across his face before he even knew it, and the expression felt strange and foreign. How long had it since he had actually found something to smile about? “I just feel a little bit weird that here I am, spilling my guts to some guy I nearly killed last night.” 

“It is weird,” Hux agreed, “but you’re also of the blood now. It means I owe you honesty that I might not owe someone else in a similar circumstance.” 

“And vice versa, I guess.” Ren wasn’t sure if he loved Hux, or if Hux loved him as well, but Hux had been kind to him, had been willing to take him and endure him to show him the way, and that was worth honesty too, loyalty as well. 

“Yes, which brings me to this,” Hux said _apropos_ of nothing. “How much of your old life do you remember, Ren? Do you know who you were before the change?” 

Ren lay with his eyes closed for a few minutes while he tried to summon the shreds of his past, and Hux held him gently spoon-wise, his free hand coming up to smooth Ren’s unruly hair away from his brow as he waited patiently for an answer. “Bits and pieces, mostly,” Ren said at last, “I know I liked guys before, that hasn’t changed, and I know I did at least a tour in the Marines, but that’s about it.”

“How about where you came from, before Iowa?” Hux probed gently, his breath ticklish on the back of Ren’s head. “Do you have an idea of where you were before?” 

“West Coast,” Ren said, his brow furrowed with concentration as he pushed his memories of Iowa out of the way. “I was just sort of — heading mindlessly east, I guess. As long as I didn’t have to stay somewhere too long. For me it all starts in Six Rivers… that’s where I was when I first woke up sick and naked and covered in blood. Why do you need to know?” 

“I was hoping you’d remember who did this to you,” Hux said, “so I can help you find some kind of justice for how your old life was stolen from you. But there’s no rush. The memories are all still there, it’s only a matter of finding your way back to them.” 

“Mm,” Ren grunted. He kept his eyes closed but forced himself to relax, found himself doing so as Hux shifted upright to rub gently at his shoulder, the side of his neck. “Hmm.” He thought himself back to Six Rivers National Forest, to rays of sunlight slanting through a canopy of green, of a crisp clean autumn air and the sound of water in his ears. The place had been a refuge for him once, a place where he had gone to leave bad things behind. His parents arguing? Something like that, but didn’t everyone’s parents fight, really? 

Ren started to tremble, to shake as he pushed himself further into the recesses of his cobwebbed memory, and he felt Hux’s touch grounding him, careful fingers playing soft and light over the dome of his skull. A new fear flitted up, a dread more solid and sustained, of nights on patrol in a bone-dry desert where men fought and died, their blood soaking a thirsty earth that always wanted more. That would have been his tour of duty, then. It was odd how the disjointed flashes of violence, like lightning strikes, seemed pale and wooden next to the very real horrors that now lived in his skull. 

_No, not that hurt either,_ Ren thought as he gazed dispassionately at what could have been his past, chased the other memories he had of the park. _Something else._ Ren was almost there. He could feel it, it was as though he had his fingers on the door handle and had just been about to twist —

Footsteps, footsteps crunching on a dry trail in the heat of summer, and low masculine laughter as he took off his shirt and doused it in water from his hydration bladder, wet it thoroughly and put it back on so the evaporation would cool his heated skin. 

_I’ve got something cool to show you, Ben._

_And you haven’t shown it to me before, why?_

_I just came across it the last time I was here alone. You know, when you were on call at work again._

Ben. _Was that my name?_ Ren thought, _my old name, my wallet name?_ Eyes dark as his flickered in his memory, a wide white smile in a brown face. 

“There was someone with me,” Ren gasped as he sat bolt upright in bed, his fingers closing hard on the sheets to find the mattress below, “there was someone with me in the forest when it happened.” 

“Shh, it’s okay, Ren. We don’t need to go any further tonight,” Hux said. He had sat up too, and was reaching out to take Ren’s hand, but Ren pulled his fingers away, grabbed at his own forehead, as though he could squeeze the memory out of his tortured skull.

“No, no, I need to tell you this before I forget again,” Ren said, sure of the fragment he had just retrieved, so painstakingly found. “His name was Poe, and I think he was my boyfriend.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The full moon is almost over, and with that Kylo Ren will be freed from his curse for another month. With that comes the fear that Hux will leave him. But Hux has a proposal to make to Ren that will mean contact with other werewolves. What will Ren do?
> 
> Content warning: Self-harming

A great black wolf slipped soundlessly through tall, uncut grass, its eyes narrowing as it lifted its nose to scent the sharp, oncoming wind. Such a confusion of smells, and the fur on its hackles fluffed up as it caught a hint of man. A normal wolf would have retreated away from humanity, but this was no normal wolf. It lingered, curious, trying to follow the scent, but then a ruddy-coated wolf padded soundlessly up to it and bit down on the thick fur of its neck, initiating a play-fight. 

The wolves yipped at each other, baring fangs as fur flew in tiny tufts, borne on the hungry whistling wind, but eventually the black wolf rolled over and showed its belly in submission, and was rewarded for its display with gentle, patient nuzzles, a brief lick to a cut on the loose skin of the throat. The ruddy wolf stood still as its companion regained its own paws, and then led the way as it slipped further into the woods. 

The fickle wind changed directions, as though agreeing with the red wolf’s choice, and the cold air brought a delicious hint of deer musk and urine, filled their minds with the promise of hot venison, of liver and heart rich with gamy blood. The black wolf licked its chops as it sniffed the air yet again, and then slunk lower into the grass, letting the foliage hide it from potential prey as it followed its companion into the dark. 

Behind them a stark white wolf padded silently out of the shadows, its fur gleaming silver as the clouds blew away to reveal the moon full and gravid in the sky. Its gaze was uncanny, its pale blue eyes intelligent as it watched for movement in the grass, and its ears twitched softly as it caught the faint rattle of hooves on the turf. Time to make sure Kylo Ren landed his prey, then.

It yipped twice, and two other wolves came out of the shadows behind it, ran in separate directions to loop around the periphery of the forest and catch spooked prey, drive it back towards the hunters to ensure success. Death ran on four legs in the woods tonight, and it was best for all involved if what died was a stag or a doe instead of yet another human being. 

Long minutes passed, dragged out to an hour as the clouds blew across the darkened sky, blotting out the swollen moon momentarily as they passed over its nacreous face. Something screamed in the depths of the forest, flailing briefly in its death agonies, and the white wolf lifted its delicate muzzle to the wind, inhaled deeply in satisfaction as it scented the richness of deer blood spilling hot into the air. In more typical circumstances it would have joined the others in the hunt, and taken a fair share of this meal, and its belly growled, reminding it of the hunger that lived always beneath its skin. 

But this was not a typical pack hunt, and this, like the others, was no ordinary wolf. The air blurred briefly, shimmered, and then a tall, slim woman stood naked beneath the moon, goosebumps rising in ripples on her unmarked skin as her flesh sought the warmth that her now-absent fur had granted her formerly. She stepped back into the darkness, groping for her discarded clothing, and began to dress as she waited for her packmates to return to her side. 

The 24-hour diner was still open, and they could easily assuage their hungers with burgers and fries, or all-day breakfasts, now that Ren was fed. Hux could handle him easily now, and through the rest of the day. 

\--- 

The morning sun found Kylo Ren curled up in a fetal ball, naked and covered in blood as was usual for this time of the month. He was not alone, however. Curled protectively around him was a ruddy wolf, and he registered the cold of its nose pressing insistently against the bump on the back of his skull as he twitched, uncurled as his overly-full belly protested at the amount he had eaten last night. 

_Oh God,_ he thought, fought a moan against the nausea and the taste of old blood in his mouth, _oh fuck, not on the sheets._ The cold nose against his skin was no longer cold, was now joined by the delicate brush of soft lips as Hux’s arms closed reassuringly around him. 

“It’s okay,” Hux murmured softly, “it’s okay.” He helped Ren up from the bed, helped him stagger into the bathroom so he could kneel before the toilet and vent his cramping belly again. Ren closed his fingers on the cold toilet seat, shaking and shivering as he vomited again and again, but this time Hux was there to hold his hair away from his face, and it was so much easier to deal with the morning now that he was not alone. 

“Ugh,” Ren managed to say, turning his face away from the vile mess he’d made of the toilet, and Hux was helping him to his feet, pressing a glass of cold water on him. Ren swished the water around his mouth and spat into the sink, ignored the flushing of the commode as he washed out his mouth again. 

“Don’t worry,” Hux said, as Ren refilled the glass at the sink, “that’s mostly venison you just threw up.”

“Mostly?” Ren asked after he took a long sip of water, felt it hitting the bottom of his freshly empty belly with a vague sense of chill. He couldn’t remember much of what happened after he changed, as usual, but he had trusted Hux to keep him safe — and to keep others safe from him. He paused after that first sip, wavering, waiting for the bad news. 

Hux shook his head once, sharply, and shrugged to banish Ren’s anxiety. “Well, there was some deer hide in there. Offal, too. But no, you didn’t hurt anyone. Nobody human, anyway. And the doe died quickly. I made sure of it.” 

Ren closed his eyes against tears of relief, left the half-empty glass on the counter. “Thank you,” he managed to say thickly, and then his shoulders were shaking as the tension began to bleed out of his body. Ren had never realized how heavy his burden had been, day after day, during each full moon, but Hux’s presence made things much easier to bear. He’d woken up two nights in a row now, where nobody had died, and it was almost unbelievable, the notion that this curse could be controlled and tamed, that he could find absolution and cleansing within this lifetime instead of the next. 

\---

“Tonight’s the last night I change this month,” Ren said as he watched Hux wipe his pale hands on the apron he wore. “Are you going to leave me then?” He’d wanted to ask this earlier, but hadn’t quite worked the courage up to do so — it had been only two days, and he could not imagine living without Hux, which was probably a selfish thing to think, since Hux had to have a family somewhere. He’d mentioned a pack in one of their earlier conversations. 

The smells of cooking gave Ren strength, though, that and the homey environment of the kitchen. Surely nothing bad could happen here, not with the smell of freshly-baked sourdough bread lingering still in the air, and the warm brown fragrance of a chicken roasting, its rendering fat sizzling on the pan under it, filling Ren’s nose. 

“What?” Hux said, looking almost surprised as he began to untie the apron strings, “No. We’re not done yet.” He paused to mutter as the strings tangled up and refused to budge, but Ren only beckoned him close. 

“Com’ere,” Ren said, and he ran a hand along Hux’s narrow waist, up the small of his back through the slippery silk and thin cotton of his waistcoat back and shirt before he applied himself to untangling the knot. “Something I never thought to ask earlier, I guess,” he continued as he freed Hux from the apron strings, “do you live here alone? What do you do?”

“This isn’t actually my house,” Hux said with a soft chuckle as he hung the apron up, then fetched a chair to sit facing Ren. “It’s family property, but not mine, if it makes sense. The family of a packmate owns this house; it’s a converted hunting lodge that became a vacation house when the town limits grew too close.” 

“The pack,” Ren mused, his eyes closing as he reached for a fragmentary memory, “there were other wolves last night, weren’t there? I think I smelled them.” 

“There were, they’re members of my pack. I didn’t approach you alone in the beginning, Ren,” Hux said easily. “The decision to try to bring you in was a pack decision, and I volunteered to —” Hux’s gaze went distant at that, steely, “to lure you in, I suppose. It sounds awfully manipulative now that I say it this way, but we were afraid you might kill again. They were here the first night, just to make sure I had backup in case you got the better of me, and they were here last night to make sure we caught our prey so you wouldn’t become hungry enough to hunt humans.” 

“It doesn’t feel manipulative to me, not really,” Ren said after a few moments of thought, of weighing Hux’s words in his mind. “I was a danger to people, out there alone, and while you showed me there isn’t much I can do to hurt you on a physical level, I could have —” He hesitated then, choking on his words. _I could have forced myself on you in a way you didn’t want._

“What you did with me that first night,” Hux said, as though reading Ren’s mind, “was with my full consent. I promise you.” He rose from his chair and reached out for Ren, squeezed gently on Ren’s tense shoulders with long, clever fingers. “I wanted to help you bear your burden.” 

“Mhm.” It was good to rest his face against Hux’s lean belly, to close his eyes and listen to the sounds of his breathing, feel his diaphragm lift against his cheek. Hux smelled like musk and salty sweat under the peppery resin notes of his cologne and the dry-cleaned wool of his waistcoat and trousers, and the fragrance of him made the hairs on Ren’s nape stand up. “You smelled so good that night. You still do.” 

“It’s a werewolf thing,” Hux said, and Ren could hear the relief in his voice, feel the tension ebbing slightly from his lean frame, “it’s how we know we’re related to each other, or aren’t. Relatives don’t smell so good, it’s probably something we evolved to avoid inbreeding.” 

_Inbreeding,_ Ren thought, felt the word remind him of the other half of his unspoken question. “Have you got a family, then? A mate? How do packs organize, anyway?” 

“My pack’s my family, Ren,” Hux said, “and they’ll be yours. As for a mate, well.” He paused, vaguely uneasy, and Ren looked up to meet his gaze, saw him bite down on his full lower lip as he hesitated briefly. “I do have one. It’s obvious from the way I speak, my accent, that I wasn’t born in America. I was sent from my birth pack in exchange to maintain — well, genetic diversity. And part of the arrangement involves mating, yes, but it’s strictly about procreating, and whatever I happen to be interested in on my own time happens to be my own business.” Hux looked almost embarrassed, which made Ren tighten his arms around Hux’s narrow waist. 

“Will I also be required to take a mate when I join the pack?” Ren asked him, curious about his own place in the family that Hux was promising him.

“Only if you’re interested in siring children,” Hux said soothingly, “and it isn’t as though you have to do it the old-fashioned way, if you do want them. It wouldn’t be difficult for you to work out an arrangement with another werewolf who happens to be a lesbian as well.” 

“Like people do,” Ren said, laughing and simultaneously on the verge of crying, “with turkey basters.” It wasn’t as though he had been disappointed by what he had just heard. No, it was the fact that Hux was offering him a future, one where he could lead a stable enough life to think of having kids. A chuckle turned into a hiccup that transformed into a sob, and then Hux was gently shushing Ren again as he burst abruptly into tears.

\---

“One of my pack mates would like to meet you, Ren, if you’re okay with it,” Hux said as he checked a message on his phone. “Do you mind?” The roast chicken had just come out of the oven and was perfuming the entire kitchen with its fragrance while Hux let it rest before carving. Its smell taunted, tempted Ren, but he busied himself with slicing the loaf of bread that Hux had pulled out of the oven earlier in the day, before the chicken had gone in to roast. 

“I’m okay, I guess,” Ren mused, unsure of what else to say. “What are they here for?”

Hux put his phone back in a waistcoat pocket, paused to turn off the burner under a large saucepan full of mushrooms and bacon seasoned with mustard. “We’ve done a bit of digging on your background, and we’re fairly sure of who you are, if you want to know who you used to be right now.” 

“Oh.” Ren let the bread knife rest on the cutting board, picked a few crumbs of bread up with his fingertip and ate them. “I don’t know how it’d feel right now, like — I’m afraid it’s gonna be like looking at someone else’s life.”

“Those memories aren’t lost to you, Ren,” said Hux as he pulled a cold bottle of sparkling water from the refrigerator. “They’re just inaccessible for now, the path to them obscured. You’ll start regaining a sense of who you are and who you used to be as you learn to read the wolf’s memories as well.”

Ren fought a shiver. A draft from the open refrigerator door, no doubt. “... Does that mean I’m going to also remember what happened during the nights?” 

“I’m afraid so.” 

Ren picked the bread knife up, stared at its stainless steel blade. The edge was dull, relying on its fine serrations to slice through soft bread, and he wondered what it would do if he applied it to his own forearm. He had turned his wrist upwards, was going to slice experimentally at it, when Hux stepped up and closed long fingers over his hand, twisted sharply until Ren dropped the knife. “Please don’t,” Hux said. This was the first time Hux had used violence upon him, and a part of Ren’s mind noticed just how strong Hux’s grip was, how much force he could exert with those wiry forearms.

“Why not? It’s not like I’m not going to heal it,” Ren said numbly.

“I know you can,” Hux said softly, “but self-harming isn’t going to grant you absolution — the pain’s just masking the emotional hurt you’re feeling, it’s just giving you a way to make something you can’t talk about visible.”

Ren let Hux turn him around then, accepted a hug. “What do I do, then?” He asked miserably against Hux’s shoulder, the nap of Hux’s wool waistcoat tickling his lips. “How do I deal with all the shit I’ve done, all the people I’ve murdered? I tried to kill myself, but it’s never worked.”

“I know you have, Ren, and it isn’t your fault,” said Hux. He began threading his fingers through Ren’s unruly hair, smoothing it down against the aching dome of his skull. “Dealing with your memories will be difficult, but I promise I’ll be with you every step of the way. And if it ever becomes too much for you to bear, then you can just ask me, and I will help you end it.” 

Ren felt himself relaxing at Hux’s warm, steady touch, at the faint scratch of Hux’s neatly trimmed fingernails against his scalp. “Okay,” he said, “okay.” A saner person would probably have not found this reassuring, but it was a comfort to Ren, that he had the option to die if it truly got that hard. It was a tiny bit of control he could exert over the course of this miserable existence, a sign that he was not truly helpless. “I don’t know if I’m up to meeting your pack mate right now, but maybe later, during dinner.”

‘I’ll schedule the meeting for dinner time, then,” Hux said, and Ren pressed his brow again to Hux’s shoulder, let out a small breath of respite.

—-

Ren had little interest in lunch after his thwarted self-harm, and Hux let him take to bed, tucking the sheets and comforter over him with practiced ease. “I’ll be back in a moment,” he told Ren, straightening up at the foot of the bed, and Ren settled himself on his side and hugged a spare pillow as he nodded. 

Hux had left the bedroom door open, and Ren could hear the rattle and clink of dishes being put away. He sighed, a jag of self-hatred boiling up within as he pulled the comforter over his head, tried to shut the world out. It wasn’t fair, Ren thought, that Hux had to deal with him like this; that he was so much of a mess that he couldn’t deal with himself. _Why would his pack even want me? I’m just going to be dead weight, an emotional wreck. What good am I to anyone?_ Hot tears leaked from his eyes and he blinked them furiously away, found his sides heaving as he tried to fight his sobs, tried to choke them down into silence. 

The air under the comforter was becoming stale, stifling, but Ren refused to poke his head out for air. He thought of the time he tried to drown himself, instead, remembered the burning ache in his chest, the sharp pain in his nose as he had inhaled water in his desperation. His body had struggled for life even while he had wanted to die, and he was deeply weary of it. The sobs refused to stay in his chest at that point. They came out like small hiccups, and he buried his face in the pillow and cried aloud, moaning in heartbreak and misery. 

Footsteps again, at the entrance to the room, and the creak of the mattress springs as Hux sat down on the other side of the bed. “Can I pull the duvet back?” he asked, his voice slightly muffled, and Ren nodded despite himself. A hit of fresh, cool air tickled his face as Hux pulled the comforter down, and then those clever fingers were playing softly over his heated brow. “Is there anything I can do for you, Ren?” Hux asked again. 

Ren shook his head, unsure. 

“Is there anything you want to do, besides lie here?” Hux asked Ren. His voice was soft, carefully pitched, and a part of Ren recognized the effort Hux was going to, to be kind and unthreatening.

Ren paused, bit down on his lip as he tried to think, and then felt his face twisting as another sob shook its way from his chest again. _No._ He shook his head again. 

“Then I’ll stay here with you and keep you company until you want to do something else,” Hux said easily, as though he was not skipping his lunch just to comfort Ren in his depression. “Is that okay?” 

Yes. Ren nodded. Hux stretched himself out across the bed still fully dressed, heedless of the wrinkles forming in his trousers and waistcoat. He was silent, unspeaking as he reached an arm out towards Ren, and Ren shuffled across inches of mattress to snuggle closer to him, to rest a hand over Hux’s belly. It was good to feel him breathing, to feel the vitality in him as they lay wordlessly together. 

“Why do you do this, Hux?” Ren asked him after a long silence, after the tears had run out for the time being. “Is it like, a duty to you?” 

“Not so much a duty, no,” Hux said thoughtfully. He had reached out a hand and was gently cupping the dome of Ren’s skull, attempting to tame his disobedient hair yet again. It was one of his favorite gestures, Ren noticed, and it was one that Ren liked quite a lot, especially when Hux used the very tips of his nails to scratch him very so lightly. The touch calmed him, soothed him, and he almost sighed aloud when Hux traced the outer curve of his left ear. 

“I was almost a lost cub, you see,” Hux said after a few more moments of thought. “That’s what we call children who inherit the change, but who don’t have any living werewolf relatives to guide them through it. My mother Maeve, she never inherited the change from her own parents, and she didn’t think I would have, so she let my father take me when I was a small child. To England, I mean. His wife — my stepmother, she wasn’t a terrible woman, I suppose, but she had no idea how to handle a son who had strange dreams, who sleepwalked in the middle of the night to wake up in the middle of digging up her prize garden. They sent me to a public school as a boarder instead of dealing with it on their own.” There was old hurt in Hux’s voice, made up of all the careless moments someone chose to treat him like a thing instead of a person, and Ren started to understand the core of Hux’s determined kindness. He was not a soft man by nature, and compassion was something he had cultivated with concentration, relentlessly, because the alternative was worse.

“How did you find out you were a werewolf, then?” Ren asked, truly curious despite being aware of Hux’s method — knowing full well that Hux was using his own past as a distraction from Ren’s own pain. 

“There was a teacher at school who was of the blood,” Hux said softly, slowly as the memories played themselves out behind those bright green eyes. His fingers moved more idly as he began to lose himself in reverie. “Not of mine, specifically, but he became a teacher specifically to look out for lost cubs — all kinds of parents send their changing sons to boarding schools, so it’s not as random as it sounds. He found out who my birth mother was, and he gave her a call and told her about my situation, and she — she made things right, I suppose.” Hux followed that with a weak little shrug, a half-smile that expressed his sadness more eloquently than words did. 

“But you still feel rejected by her?” Ren asked, more to confirm his guess than out of ignorance.

Hux sighed softly and let go of Ren’s head, paused to stare up at the ceiling for a few moments. “She wasn’t exactly in a great position to keep me, you know. I can’t blame her, intellectually. She was seventeen, and acting out because her parents favored her sister, who changed. But I suppose our relationship has never really been that of mother and son. Her parents had more of the raising of me than she did, if only because they had to teach me how to live as a werewolf.” 

“That’s why you came here, to America, to join a new pack?” 

A distant smile spread itself across Hux’s face, grew more immediate as he rolled over on the mattress to look straight into Ren’s face. “Very perceptive. Yes. I never did fit in back home with my birth pack, being too posh and too English even for Dublin, so I came here.” 

“Where Americans go weak-kneed at the sound of your voice,” Ren said, smiling despite the phantom weights in his heart, dragging him low. 

“The accent is an advantage, I confess,” Hux said with a little laugh, and the sound of it brought a faint relief to Ren’s gut. “So you see, I do this not because I want to be any kind of savior — that just sounds exhausting to me. Just that I know what it means to be utterly alone, to have the world not make sense, and — well.” 

“I understand,” Ren said, and he closed his eyes as Hux leaned in and kissed him on the forehead. He returned the kiss, caught Hux on the chin before he let his mouth linger softly on the pulse of his neck. Hux began to melt into Ren’s touch, and Ren tossed the pillow aside, pushed the covers off his chest so they wouldn’t get in the way. 

Hux sprawled easily on top of Ren, the cold buttons of his waistcoat raising goosebumps on Ren’s belly as Hux rucked his t-shirt up, and their mouths touched again and again in brief nibbling kisses. Their legs tangled together, and Ren was content to just kiss Hux, to while the minutes away fumbling clumsily at the buttons of his waistcoat and shirt. It was good to touch him like this, to grind softly and slowly against each other in growing arousal as they took their own sweet time.

Ren managed to drag gasps and moans out of Hux’s throat after he stripped Hux’s waistcoat off him, rucking the tail of his shirt upwards to plant his mouth hotly on the smooth plane of Hux’s belly, and Hux had taken hold of his unruly black hair and tugged fiercely in an attempt to urge him downward. Ren hissed and shivered at the sharp clean pain of Hux’s fist in his hair, pulling away from his scalp, but he refused to be pushed this time and instead worked his way upwards, mouthing at the soft spot just beneath Hux’s sternum as he fumbled one-handed with the buttons on Hux’s trouser fly. The buttons were good for friction, Ren noticed as Hux keened prettily and arched off the mattress to buck against his hand. 

“This is gonna sound selfish,” Ren murmured against Hux’s jaw as they paused to catch their breath, “but I really don’t know what I’m going to do without you.”

“You won’t have to,” Hux said solemnly, seriously, “because I’m not leaving. Not until you’re ready and you want me to.” 

Ren slowed his attentions, turned his gaze upwards to meet Hux’s eyes, sucked in a quick breath for courage. “What if I want to keep you, after I’m done?” 

Another one of those breathtaking smiles flitted across Hux’s face, settled into a grin. “Then I’d seriously consider staying,” he said, “I like you a lot, and not just because I feel sorry for you.”   
“I’m so glad this isn’t just a pity fuck.” Ren found himself chuckling despite himself, charmed utterly in the midst of relief that Hux liked him, too. 

Hux shook his head briefly, and the movement tousled his hair against the pillow, left him looking debauched. “It has never been a pity fuck, at any point of this — situation, I suppose. Arrangement — ah!” Words failed him as Ren began nibbling at the horn buttons on his trouser fly, his broad hands reaching back to cup the backs of Hux’s thighs, to caress him lightly through the fabric of his trousers. 

Ren took Hux slowly this time, pinning him gently down by the wrists, whispering filthily in his ears as he used him sweetly. “You’re perfect, do you know that? The heat of your tight little ass, the way you yelp when I make you take it,” Ren growled, and Hux shuddered beneath him, moaned prettily in response to each of Ren’s slow, deep thrusts. 

The sight of Hux lying passive in his ravishment sent a surge of heat and hunger rising up Ren’s spine, made him want to leave Hux raw, but still he managed to hold back, to pace himself. He pushed back on Hux’s ankles, bending him almost double as he tilted his hips upwards, to thrust even deeper into him. A part of him remained unsatisfied despite this, despite the hot velvet softness of Hux’s asshole caressing his aching cock, setting his nerve endings alight. 

No, Ren wanted to make Hux break, wanted to tear that perfect composure open to reveal the raw want and desperation lurking beneath that beautiful face. Hux was moving too, beneath Ren, arching into each of Ren’s strokes, their movements synchronized. 

“What do I have to do,” Ren asked, slowing, gritting his teeth against his own arousal and frustration as he shifted himself again, kept his thrusts shallow and unsatisfying, “to make you beg?” 

“Do you want me to ask for it?” Hux asked him, and Ren watched his very white teeth sink into his lower lip for a brief moment, grinned at the way he had to steady himself with a sharp intake of breath. 

“Beg me,” Ren told him, pulling almost all the way out, leaving just the head of his cock in Hux’s slick asshole, edging him carefully. “Tell me what you want.”

“I want your cock in me, Ren,” Hux whispered aloud, his flush deepening until his face was almost crimson.

“I can barely hear you,” Ren said, resenting the hoarseness in his own voice, knowing that it betrayed his own desperation too. 

“I want you to fill me up,” Hux continued, his voice gaining volume as he closed his eyes and began to willingly relinquish control. 

“Yeah?” Ren said, the strain audible in his voice as he rewarded Hux with a deep, hard thrust, “And then what else do you want?” 

Hux whined, whimpered as Ren found his prostate, shivered. “I want — oh God — I want you to put that filthy great prick in me. I want you to fuck me raw and leave me screaming.” 

“That’s a good boy,” Ren growled as he abandoned his attempts at lasting, fucked Hux mercilessly and hard in response, “see how easy it is?” 

“I beg you,” Hux keened, staying in character, “I need you to make me come on your cock, and then you can —” Hux’s voice failed him then as Ren found his prostate again, “you can use my mouth and come all over my face.” 

Ren fought a shudder at that, found himself driving hard and deep into the white-hot heat of Hux’s ass despite himself. “I could rub it in afterwards, wipe my cock off on your hair. What would you have to say to that?” Ren growled between thrusts, and he was surprised to find Hux arching up against him. Hux was close, Ren realized, and he anticipated that eager shudder, that desperate stillness. He licked at his dry lips and let go of Hux’s wrists, took his hips instead and angled himself upwards. 

Hux reached up to grab at the wrought-iron headboard with sweaty fingers, keened aloud again as Ren reached down to close his broad hand over his cock, pumping him mercilessly in time with his thrusts. “Oh,” Hux gasped, “ _oh_ , oh fuck, Daddy,” he whimpered, his voice rising as he came, “ _Daddy!_ ” 

Ren had to pull out of Hux’s ass almost immediately, so close was he, but he barely gave Hux time to recover. He reached out with his spunk-smeared hand, took a fistful of Hux’s hair and pulled him up to a sitting position until his plush lips brushed against Ren’s straining, lube-slick cock. 

Hux sucked in a long breath and began to plant sloppy kisses on Ren’s cockhead, licked a broad stripe up the sensitive ridge of the frenulum, lapped wetly at the sensitive ridge of the corona. Ren bucked upwards against Hux’s sweet ministrations, growled deeply in satisfaction as Hux took his cock without complaint, and then gasped when Hux reached out to grasp his hips. 

He felt Hux pulling him deeper, shivered and then groaned aloud as the head of his cock slid past Hux’s tonsils with a soft _click_. He could feel Hux swallowing around him, the peristalsis of his throat muscles incredible, irresistible. Ren started to thrust mindlessly, to fuck Hux’s throat in a raw frenzy of desire as his balls tightened and heat licked up the base of his spine. It was so good like this, so good to let go. 

It was so pleasurable, in fact, that Ren only remembered to pull out, to come over Hux’s face when he was just at the edge of climax. “Fuck,” he gasped, pushed against Hux’s shoulder gently, but the movement itself sent enough sweet friction through the nerve endings in his cock that he came before he was fully out. 

Sweet agony lit up his spine, blazed through his body as he spilled himself in long, aching spurts, his come spurting thick and sticky in Hux’s perfect teasing mouth. 

“I’m sorry,” Ren managed to say, once he had found his powers of speech again, as the dazzling in his vision receded, his pulse roaring loud in his ears. 

“No,” Hux laughed, licking at his sticky lips, “no, it’s all right.” 

“It’s all right?” Ren asked, seeking confirmation that he had not disappointed Hux in any way.

“There’s always later,” Hux said, pressing his mouth softly to Ren’s belly. “After dinner, I mean. We _are_ expecting a guest, and I don’t think we should stay in bed any longer, or we could get all distracted again.”

Ren reached down to tip Hux’s face upwards, shuffled backwards so he could plant a kiss on his pale brow. “We would,” Ren agreed, “yeah.”


End file.
